Category Archives: LJ

Watched both Return of the Jedi and Phantom Menace yesterday. Probably going to round out the week with Attack of the Clones. Shiny. Yup.

Writing Stuff:
My “Sub-Genre Spotlight: Cyberpunk” article is due to go up next Monday at IROSF (assuming they follow their new publication schedule of “last Monday of the month”), but I have yet to receive edits to approve. Or a contract for that matter. Wonder if I should I be concerned?

Did two editorial passes–one for the fantasy piece and one for the slipstream piece.
Word count: 500. Barely.

Club 100 for Writers
14/100

500/day
2

Hungry skunk. Sleepy me. No sleep for she-who-chops-the-veggies. Fed skunk. Awake now. Blah.

Went to see The Winter’s Tale at the Shakespeare Tavern last night. They did an excellent job of this quirky and occasionally bizarre play. I’d forgotten the details of it since it’s been years since I last saw it, and it’s never been one of my favorites. But the folks at the tavern did a fabulous job.

Also on a Star Wars binge. Watched Episode IV on Friday, V yesterday, and going to watch Return of the Jedi today. Maybe The Phantom Menace too.

After a nap . . .

Writing stuff:
Re-read the Cricket rejection, because once I got past “we regret” the first time, not much else sank it. Discovered my editor also included the name of the artist who they’re having illustrate “Razi and the Sunbird” for their February ’05 issue: Elbrite Brown.

I’m totally jazzed. This guy won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator Award (which is an American Library Association award like the Caldecott and the Newbery) in ’04 for My Family Plays Music. I’m sorely tempted to head out to Barnes & Noble to get a peek inside this book. I’m having an ALA award winner illustrating my story!

I’m also beginning to jones for another sale. *twitch*

Feeling decidedly blah today. No reason, just out of sorts, I guess.

So this isn’t a total downer of a post, here’s a couple closeups of Hobkin. Sleeping, of course:

Writing Stuff:
Received a 136-day pleasant personal rejection from Cricket that nevertheless took the wind out of my sails. The editor was complimentary: “It is well written (from you, how could it not be?) but . . .” It stings worse getting rejected from a place I’ve sold to in the past. Apparently they bought something similar for Spider recently. Now I have to try to find another market that might be interested in a 1700-word re-telling of the Chinese creation myth. My editor did comment that my middle-grade novel is “still getting additional reads” there. I hope that’s a good thing. At least it means it’s still under consideration.

Mailed out the next Cricket story in my submissions-in-waiting queue.

There are no fewer than eight clocks in our downstairs area: bedroom clock-radio, bathroom shower clock-radio, stove, coffee-maker, microwave, computer, VCR, and kitchen counter. None of them, NONE of them display the same time. The discrepancy varies from one minute to eight from the bathroom to the computer. Normally, I wouldn’t think eight minutes is that big of a deal. It is, however, the difference between ambling out to the garage at a leisurely pace and cruising to work like a sane person, and screeching like a chipmunk out of purgatory down the driveway and careening up 400 at breakneck speed to arrive eight minutes late. It doesn’t help matters that the clock in my car is several minutes faster than the fastest of the house clocks. Glah.

Project for this weekend: synchronize all the clocks in the house.

Writing Stuff:
A graduate student is doing his master’s thesis in Behavioral Psychology on writing productivity and looking for volunteer subjects through Critters. That, paired with my Club 100 efforts has made me take a closer look at my writing goals. (It has also piqued my latent psychology researcher interests.) Anyway, Club 100 has shown me that 1K/day was not a good goal for me at this point because I couldn’t meet it consistently, and the dejection I felt about slacking off made it harder for me to approach each new writing session with a sense of purpose and accomplishment. 100/day is much more manageable. Of course, I haven’t hit my 100th-day goal, but I’m finding 100/day not to be arduous, and it has really helped me pull out of a few writing bumps. If I get stuck, I barrel through a hundred words. If I’m still stuck after that, I quit for the day. The next day, I hammer out another hundred. After a few days of this, I find I’m past the scene I was stuck on, and back into flow. I read over the methodology for this psych. study and it got me thinking about what my goals actually were with regard to productivity. I’m mulling over setting myself a goal of 10K words/month. That’s pretty close to what I’ve managed these last few years, with a slight push to challenge me.

Going to try to implement that as a secondary goal in tandem with my Club 100 efforts. That’s five-hundred words a day, giving myself weekends to catch up and/or rest. If I get stuck, I’ll go back to one-hundred with a pat on the back for managing that many, and if I do significantly more than five-hundred, well maybe I’ll treat myself to an ice cream cone at the end of the week or something.

In other writing news, my story didn’t make it into this batch of Critters manuscripts. This wouldn’t be a biggie, except this is a two-weeker. Dangit.

New words: 1000
And my princess fantasy is done! At zero draft in any case. It’s hovering right at novelette length. Did an editing pass on it and cut out a couple hundred words here and there. It needs several more passes before I hand it off to Matthew to first reader, but I’m thrilled to betsy to have finished another story.

Club 100 for Writers
13/100

# of Sequential Days Achieving 500/day
1

Left home a little earlier this morning because I knew I needed to stop at a gas station for a fill up. Pulled up to the stop sign that marks the end of my subdivision, and I saw a queue of three cars sitting there. I figured they were waiting to go, which is what people normally do when they’re at a stop sign, but to my bewilderment (and thankfully before I pulled in behind them), the last one began to back up. It backed all the way down the road. The second car then proceeded to also back up. I thought, “Oh, the first car broke down and they’re trying to get around it.” No, once the second car cleared, the first one backed down the road too. They all drove back into the subdivision.

Huh?

But okay, after watching this baffling hullabaloo I made my way to the stop sign and turned. Waiting to merge onto the main road, I saw that traffic had paused for a school bus making a pickup, and in the backed-up string of cars was no fewer than five yellow buses. Apparently I hit the exact time for school bus central. And then I wondered, are parents in my subdivision driving their kids to the bus stop which is at most, a block away, and then waiting in their cars until their children are safely picked up? My subdivision is tiny–only thirty-two houses down two roads that both end in cul-de-sacs–and located in a nice, safe, relatively affluent, area. Yet parents don’t feel it’s safe for their children to wait for the bus?

In less mind-boggling news, yesterday was official “Have a Party with Your Bear” Day. When I came home, it was to find most of the bear denizens of our home waiting with excitement and anticipation for their party:

How could a person with any compassion disappoint those furry faces? So Matthew and I had tortellini for dinner with pie for dessert, and then we put on Monsters Inc., which we thought a fitting presentation in observation of Have a Party with Your Bear Day. The feature was met with general approval and praise by the bears.

Writing Stuff:
Received 2nd and 3rd quarter royalty statements from Scrybe Press for sales of Ascendancy of Blood. Thank you to everyone who’s bought it, and remember, it makes a great stocking stuffer for the holidays!

Wrote a review for Tangent of this week’s Sci-Fiction offering and emailed it to my editor. It was a very short story this week, a change from the novelettes and novellas that Sci-Fiction has been publishing of late.

Also, I saw a new market had sprung up, Aeon. They only accept electronic submission from their “List” of professional writers with track records (they take snail mail submission from others), so I fired off an email to their editors asking whether I qualified to be on their “List.” Yes, apparently I do. Always happy to save money on postage.

New words: 500
Working on the Princess fantasy now. I think I’m actually close to finishing. Through my Club 100 efforts I’ve managed to keep plugging away at this one, and now I find myself past the climax and coasting toward the denouement. Coolness. It’s cresting at 6K word processor count. I’m really going to have to work to keep this one under novelette length.

Club 100 for Writers
12/100

Went to see The Incredibles yesterday. While the theater was indeed less crazy than it was on Saturday, it was still pretty spastic. What happened to teaching children the difference between “indoor voice,” “outdoor voice,” and “shhh!”? There was a row of children behind us who not only didn’t understand “shhh!” but they hadn’t managed to grasp “indoor voice” either. Loud and persistent distractions notwithstanding, The Incredibles was great! Both of us laughed right out loud. Matthew thought it started a little slow–too much focus on the soul-sucking suburbia elements–but I was pretty enthralled from the get go. I liked it best when the family combined their superpowers, and I also really liked the costume creator-genius, “E.” Much giggling, shiny animation FX, and even some clever writing. Go, Pixar! Rah.

Writing Stuff:
Received: 18-day form reject from Alchemy

Words: 100

In my editing, I seem to have added words instead of cut. Hmm. I also completed two editorial passes. Time to hand it over to Matthew to first-reader.

Club 100 for Writers
10/100

Writing Stuff:

Iris Chang’s death got me reflecting a lot on the past, and death and dying. Finished the story I’m working on with another 400 words, but it went in a totally different direction than I had intended, shaded by my thoughts of her suicide. I also went back in and made some major tweaks and changes to the storyline and characters, and suddenly it’s a lot more personal than I had intended.

Still needs work, of course. Going to give it another couple passed before turning the zero draft over to Matthew for evisceration. I hesistated after I typed out “The End,” debating briefly with myself whether I should offer it up to the public–critters, editors, and prospective readers alike. But in the end, it’s still a story I want to tell. Storytellers need audiences.

Club 100 for Writers
9/100

Oh. My. God. I just learned that someone I knew from my high school committed suicide. My high school was a laboratory school, 250 kids across five years. Class sizes were around 50 kids. Everyone knew everyone.

Iris Chang was an upperclassman, but I’d known and talked to her. Our parents knew each other as well. She was also an award-winning and best-selling writer. She wrote The Rape of Nanking, the chronicle of the Japanese occupation of China as well as a bunch of other historical Chinese-culture books. She was thirty-six. She was found in her car, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to her head. I’m in a state of shock.

gannet, you’re probably the only person on my friends list who knew her too. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the link to the memorial on Uni’s website.

Writing Stuff:
My excerpt “The Adventures of Trina, Hackersprite” is now up at the Eggplant Literary Productions Library. Click on the cover art to read it:

And the cover for the Embark to Madness anthology has been unveiled:

Words: 2.4K. This story’s nearly done. I jumped ahead and wrote the denouement and conclusion. The only thing left is a page or two of climax. Then, of course, there’s much polishing and shining that needs doing. Definitely a novelette here. I’m cresting toward 10K words (manuscript count). I suspect I can get that down some in the rewrite.

Now how do I count rewriting into the Club 100 figures? I really think rewriting should count. Perhaps two passes equals 100 words?

Club 100 for Writers
8/100